He Spoke To The Birds

HE SPOKE TO THE BIRDS

 

Artists: Jeremias Rumpl, Diego Azzola, Huang Zhe

Curated by: Fanfan Yuxuan Fan

Via Sermide 7, 00182 Rome, Italy

June 17 – July 28, 2026

 

FanFlus and the AAIE Center for Contemporary Art are pleased to present He Spoke to the Birds, a three-person group exhibition curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan, featuring works by Jeremias Rumpl, Diego Azzola, and Huang Zhe.

The exhibition title draws inspiration from a reflection by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on Saint Francis of Assisi: "he even spoke to the birds" (il parlait même aux oiseaux).[1] This expression recalls one of the founding principles of Arte Povera: a vision of the world in which human and nonhuman, the entire creation, coexist on the same plane, and in which humanity recognizes itself as part of nature. Art thus returns to its most essential state, bringing to the fore the intrinsic energy and language of matter. A sensibility that lives on in the practices of the three artists through corroded zinc, galvanized pipes, and traces of smoke.

Jeremias Rumpl works with zinc sheets onto which he transfers images from his sketchbooks. He then subjects the metal to acid etching, welding, and exposure to atmospheric agents that cause corrosion. The rust that emerges is the result of the chemical reaction between acid and zinc: a faithful testimony to the very existence of the material. The material completes what the image alone cannot express. This generates a double narrative, in which the representations of ruins and decay reflect the corrosion of the sheets themselves: time is not simply represented, but engraved into the object.

Diego Azzola's installations are rooted in the elemental. The galvanized pipes evoke the logic of Roman aqueducts, systems that once transported the city's lifeblood and which today, stripped of their original function, enter into dialogue with figurative painting. Sensitive to the contemporary estrangement from nature and open to the possibilities offered by new materials, Azzola stages the organic alongside the industrial, the fluid alongside the fixed. His constant attention to aquatic and marine worlds harks back to a primordial vitality: matter becomes the place where a lost nature resurfaces, where life takes shape and energy continues to circulate.

Smoke permeates the space of memory that Huang Zhe constructs on linen canvas. The recurring forms of his works are rooted in his childhood spent in a Buddhist family in southern China, where incense and its suspended mist shaped daily experience. In his research, smoke becomes a residue of perception, connecting figure, time, and absence, spreading and dissolving across the pictorial surface. An impalpable material par excellence, it acts as an emotional filter, transposing latent sensory experiences into the present of painting and liberating contingency, the flow of micro-emotions.

Presented in Rome, a city stratified by centuries of stone, ruins, and water, the exhibition enters into dialogue with the legacy of Arte Povera: not to add ideas to things, but to discover what is already present in them—contingency, the flow of energy, a subjectivity renewed through contact with matter. Speaking to birds means believing that every creature possesses a voice worthy of being heard. The three artists share this same conviction: that zinc, pipes, and smoke are not instruments of expression, but interlocutors. Corroding, remembering, wandering, and dissolving, each of them releases the latent energy already contained in the world. Because it has never been just birds who have something to say.

[1] Wychowanok, Thibaut. “Les chefs-d’œuvre de l’Arte Povera are exposed to the Bourse de commerce.” Numéro, 10 October 2024. https://numero.com/art/numero-art/arte-povera-bourse-de-commerce-interview-carolyn-christov-bakargiev/

Lyrics by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan